It is useful to continually monitor certain bodily functions. For example, by monitoring basal body temperature over a period of weeks, one can determine the time of ovulation or detect the onset of viral illnesses such as the common cold early enough for certain anti-viral medications (e.g., amantadine) to thwart the progress of the disease. By monitoring the electrical activity of the heart, one can detect the onset of serious myocardial ischemia before it progresses to a heart attack (myocardial infarction). By continually monitoring the glucose levels to blood in diabetics, one can feed the data to a microprocessor that can control the infusion of insulin by a pump in correlation with the measured glucose level. For over a decade now, I have been working on and perfecting a device which I call CAMBY (TM), an acronym for Computer Assisted Monitoring of the Body, which is capable of the useful functions I have just delineated. This application describes each function of the device in detail.
Until the present invention, there has not been any device capable of reliably and continuously monitoring ovulation, cardiac ischemia, or elevated glucose levels. Typically, the basal body temperature is determined by taking one's temperature upon awakening. There are kits that allow one to measure the core body temperature upon arising in the morning by measuring the temperature of the first morning urine specimen. However, the temperature one measures upon awakening is not the basal body temperature (as explained below) and this method of guessing the basal body temperature is tedious and subject to many errors. There are portable monitors for monitoring electrocardiac activity of a subject and some of them are able to detect cardiac arrythmias, even providing for the automatic injection of anti-arrythmic medications. Currently marketed monitors are for very special use by only a limited number of people. However, there is no monitor suitable for more general use that detects and warns of the kind of cardiac ischemia that can lead imminently to a heart attack.
There are glucose-sensors which use enzyme-based systems for monitoring blood glucose, but despite over two decades of research no one has been able to develop a sensor that works reliably over a period of many weeks.